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HomeDepot's ecommerce is a joke. Not only the shopping experience is poor, they treat logistics as if they were doing you a favor. And, on top of all that, you

HomeDepot's ecommerce is a joke. Not only the shopping experience is poor, they treat logistics as if they were doing you a favor. And, on top of all that, you get damaged items. I made 7 purchases and all 7, in different periods of time, had to be returned or replaced. Same for Lowe's. There's a reason people shop on Amazon. Other than BestBuy, no other retailer "gets" ecommerce.

coding123 7y ago
This is a key point. Especially for prime items, but largely to other items they sell that are not fulfilled by them. It just feels like there is more responsibility through the amazon platform than other websites. I ordered a case of water through Amazon through a reseller. The shipment literally got lost. Amazon dispute, 20 minutes later, refund is done. I am waiting for a resolution through Paypal from another website - off amazon - since Friday for toilet paper that will definitely not be sent. After looking at policies, etc.. they generally don't do refunds. Though, I did have luck on one other site.
kbash9 7y ago
Never had an issue with costco.com where I've made some of my big purchases.
- Someone1234 7y ago
  Just this week I had an issue with Costco.com. Ordered an item, their delivery estimate was 3-5 days. 7 days passed and the item hasn't shipped. No updated ETA or any information/communication on how long it might take. Decided to cancel and order from an alternative vendor (who would communicate better, frankly). Was unable to even cancel it online (cancel button was missing, in contradiction to their help docs). Tried to use Online Chat to cancel, which was seemingly offline/broken for multiple days. Finally called their customer service number, and it was cancelled within the hour (which credit where credit is due was one of the best telephone customer service experiences I've had). Took all of 10 days to NOT receive a 3-5 day item from Costco.com, the replacement item ordered elsewhere arrived in 48 hours. Still don't know how long the Costco.com item would have taken because they never communicated that.
  - ethbro 7y ago
    From experience internally (not at Costco, but other t20 retail), here's what happened, from most to least likely. 1. Your order type fell into an edge cast that an incomplete batch system -> system transfer job choked on. Naturally, it silently failed. 2. Inventory count mismatch. 3. Incomplete transportation handshake. Logistics looks simple from a customer perspective: (1) order, (2) ship, (3) receive. From a vendor perspective it's (1+) bulk source, (2+) distribute, (3) maintain consistent inventory counts, (4) receive order, (5) source order items from stock most efficiently, (6) orchestrate multi-sourced items, (7+) provision & batch transportation, receiving and reshipping at multiple legs, (8+) fulfill last mile. All while stitching together 30+ year old systems for each of those. And the +'d items are all semi-outside of the company's control. (Ever wonder why there are so many transportation-abstraction companies?) Which is to say, no excuse for bad service. But it's a bear of a problem. Incidentally, why most retail has excellent customer support phone centers (usually onshore): they know their systems break a non-zero amount of time, and want the best touch when you need to have things fixed.
cpascal 7y ago
> Other than BestBuy, no other retailer "gets" ecommerce Target.com is a pretty solid experience. Walmart.com is also surprisingly good. Although I'm sure people can provide horror stories for both retailers.
- dawnerd 7y ago
  Walmart still suffers the same problem Amazon has with 3rd party sellers. Quality can vary greatly depending on who you're buying from on their platform. Target and Best Buy definitely nailed it.
  - gowld 7y ago
    If you have an ad blocker. Target sells ad space to random 3rd parties.
  - wozniacki 7y ago
    Walmart has been spot on with both their delivery as well pickup-in-store items. I wish they installed FREEZER SILOS at all of their locations for their pickup-in-store FROZEN foods that can be ordered online. Right now only select places have them. You cant order frozen foods online at the rest of the locations. But otherwise they have been great with all of my orders. HomeDepot and Lowes are a joke. HomeDepot.com even tried to sneak in a 'handling fee' at the checkout ( paraphrasing I forget what they called it ) for a small kitchen appliance though it said 'free shipping' at first glance next to the item description.
- whymauri 7y ago
  I'll toss Staples on to there. I ordered a chair two years ago. Relatively modern website, free delivery, and it arrived earlier than anticipated with no damage. Just make sure you unsubscribe from their newsletter. I also think they'll price-match.
  - mortenjorck 7y ago
    I was surprised when I ordered from Staples.com a week or two ago. They have a top-tier e-commerce experience, fast shipping (I think my free one-day shipping was a temporary quarantine thing), and they seem to be better at packing than Amazon.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
croshan 7y ago
Sure, but they handle it well. I placed an order for a pair of 35lb dumbbells, and only one came, and the cardboard box around it was falling apart. I called customer support, probably for the first time in my life, to ask wtf happened. And they explained the logistics issue (the dumbbells were shipped separately for some reason), and ended up crediting me half the cost of the dumbbells, even though the first wasn't really damaged. Also their dumbbells were better and cheaper than Amazon's, so there's that too.
- lkbm 7y ago
  > (the dumbbells were shipped separately for some reason) USPS limits packages to 70 LBs. There's probably some special option to get around this, but for the "normal" shipping, that's the limit.
  - TylerE 7y ago
    If there is, it will cost 5x as much. They really don’t like special handling.
ravenstine 7y ago
To be fair, the in-person shopping experience at Home Depot is exactly the same. They're staying true to their ethos. ;)
Shivetya 7y ago
Best Buy is great, especially for delivery. Apple, CostCo, Ashley Home Funiture, Wayfair, Wal-Mart, and some minor players, have all performed well in my usage and those who I know also use them. Now with two I had a damaged item they did not want any part of returned, apparently this is common with free shipping deals as the return shipping for larger items can be ridiculous. Home Depot I have to agree with assessments others have made, lost an item off their own dock and when recreating the order after two weeks of back and forth; UPS was getting annoyed too, they wanted to remake the order and charge full shipping again. Just really bad customer service. They really do act like all screw ups are yours.
sseagull 7y ago
I imagine this is one of those things where everyone has different experiences. Or maybe it depends on location. We recently moved into a new house (from an apartment) and needed lots of little things renters never worry about. I have ordered quite a bit of stuff from Home Depot, from a washer & dryer to a lawn mower to random small tools and paint. Never had any issue whatsoever.
AmVess 7y ago
Nordstrom does it well. I buy shirts and things and they arrive reasonably packaged, and include a return print out ready to go. Returning an item is as simple as putting the print out on the outside of a box and leaving it for the mail collector.
Someone1234 7y ago
I had a Home Depot order delivered recently, zero padding. It was just a cardboard box surrounding the product, and the product itself had little internal packaging (inc. Lithium Ion batteries). I'm surprised Home Depot hasn't started fires before. Luckily the product I ordered worked fine, but I wasn't best pleased when I opened it. It was pretty obvious the manufacturer designed the product packaging for retail shelves only, and Home Depot just assumed it was shipping-grade protection.
- passthejoe 7y ago
  My favorite from Target was eight Contigo travel mugs (bought for holiday gifts) that came in a very large box with no padding. Even though they could have clanked around and gotten very scratched, they were all OK. Sort of a miracle, but it didn't give me much confidence in Target.com. And you can't state quantities on the Target.com site when you select an item. You have to go into the cart and change the quantity. That's something most sites do better. Also, I understand it's a difficult time inventory-wise, but don't let me put stuff in my cart if you can't deliver it and won't let me order anything until I remove them. Give me a "save for later" feature ... like Amazon does.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    One thing that’s weird about target is that they fulfill from stores. Usually when we get a shady packaging experience it’s shipping from a Target store from some unusual place.
mauvehaus 7y ago
I beg to differ. Rock Auto is where it's at for auto parts. The website is ugly as hammered shit, but it's fast, shows you the options grouped by rough quality level (economy/you cheapskate, daily driver, performance, etc), shows you what part to select so it ships from the same warehouse as the parts already in your cart and saves you shipping, and returns are painless (disclaimer: I've only ever done returns for core exchanges). I have never had a better online purchasing experience. And the prices are a fraction of what you pay at a brick and mortar place. Especially for e.g. wiper blades. Companies that "get" e-commerce are out there, but a lot of them are quietly and competently doing their thing in unsexy domains and aren't trying to eat the whole pie. Rock Auto, for instance, isn't trying to serve every idiot on the planet with a car. If you can't keep your lefts/rights and fronts/backs straight when ordering e.g. brake hoses, you're going to find it a frustrating experience. Putting up a (small) barrier to entry to keep out the least clueful people probably helps keep their costs down. Not affiliated, just a very happy repeat customer.
- racnid 7y ago
  Their website is one of the clearest and easiest to navigate parts website I've ever come across. I just wish there was an equivalent for motorcycles.
  - kube-system 7y ago
    Bikebandit's website isn't too bad after you figure out how to select your bike.
- solotronics 7y ago
  I like NAPA/Oreilly where you can see whats in a store and have them set the parts aside for you so they are there when you get there.
  - mauvehaus 7y ago
    Advance and I believe Autozone also let you place orders for in-store pickup. At one point, Advance was putting a coupon code right at the top of the homepage that would save you 20% off your order if you did that.
beamatronic 7y ago
Target is okay although I often get cosmetically damaged packaging.
powvans 7y ago
I thought the same thing about Home Depot until this hit. I've had the opposite experience with them the last few weeks. Things come quickly, my cart is consistent wherever I am logged in, and I can just add pretty much as much stuff as I want and get it all delivered the next day for $9. I'm loving the express delivery. In general it would always be worth it for me to spend $9 to get stuff delivered from Home Depot. Pre-pandemic it's a solid hour or more in the car to cover the 4.3 miles there and back from my house. Maybe I'm getting a better experience because I'm in Atlanta and there's a bit of a headquarters halo effect. Their search and general catalog organization isn't great. I just use Google as my entrance to their site and that makes life easier.
smichel17 7y ago
I've been pretty happy with newegg, and my recent electronics purchases have been split between it, Amazon, and direct from manufacturer (preferring direct unless there is a significant price difference, due to counterfeit-wariness).
Spooky23 7y ago
That’s crazy. Target smokes Amazon for most things these days, especially with pickup. Ditto for NewEgg and Walmart. Amazon is increasingly overrated, they peaked a decade ago and have declined to a warehouse club/flea market.
- cschneid 7y ago
  Newegg and Walmart have fallen to the same thing Amazon has: allowing 3rd party sellers. They're not as far along, but going down that path is what causes so many issues with counterfeits and generally poor experiences. I accidentally bought some thermal paste from a newegg seller who shipped it via slow-boat-from-china, and it took weeks to get to me. It was technically listed, but I hate any shopping experience that forces me to be on high alert not to get screwed (as minor as super-slow shipping is).
  - reilly3000 7y ago
    Target is getting into the 3rd party seller game through Target+. It appears they have a pretty tight process for what gets approved to sell and who gets to sell it. Target by culture is extremely intentional about what they allow on their shelves, and it appears they are following suit with their 'curated' 3rd party sellers.
  - senderista 7y ago
    AFAIK Amazon is the only online retailer that commingles their own inventory with 3rd-party sellers, making it impossible to avoid counterfeits.
- gregmac 7y ago
  I honestly don't understand the 3rd party seller thing. I went from buying almost all PC parts from NewEgg (without even bothering to price shop), to pretty much avoiding the site entirely. If you look at almost any of the 3rd party sellers' pages and sort by rating, you'll pretty much see the same pattern on all: a tiny handful of 4-5 star reviews, 1 star reviews by the bottom of page 1, and the remaining 80 pages of products have no reviews at all. Is this really helping Walmart/NewEgg/Amazon/etc vs them just selling the same products directly themselves? Why do this -- are they just trying to avoid these sellers starting competing no-name e-commerce sites?
arkades 7y ago
Try mcmaster-carr. They beat the stuffing out of home depot, lowe's and amazon all when it comes to hardware.
- jakearmitage 7y ago
  Holy crap, this is awesome. I could find the EXACT pipe fitting I needed. How did I not know about this?
jasonjayr 7y ago
I assist a small drop ship supplier listing their product in Home Depot. Their item management system is absolutely the pits, and requires the use of awful protected excel worksheets in order to get mass data in and out of the system. All the product syndication systems that they recommend are obnoxiously expensive for the amount of SKUs we need to maintain due to product variants. Overstock & Wayfair are way easier to work with by comparison.
Buttons840 7y ago
Even BestBuy has problems. I have an order waiting to ship I want to cancel/return (unopened) but they won't let me. Guess they'll have to go through the full return process rather than just let me cancel. Meanwhile, Amazon can cancel items even after they ship most of the time.
battery_cowboy 7y ago
Target is pretty great, I replaced Amazon with Target for most things.
munificent 7y ago
> Other than BestBuy, no other retailer "gets" ecommerce. Sweetwater for music gear. They are the only online company I've ever dealt with that I consider better than Amazon.
FridgeSeal 7y ago
Chain Reaction Cycles for bike gear is unmatched, and outdoes Amazon by a mile. Search, sorting and faceting features are unmatched: Looking for a pair of handlebars: you can filter by material, colour, width, diameter, rise, sweep, brand, stock level, price. Need some wheels, specifically a wheel set that has a 25mm internal rim diameter, for road biking, disc brake compatible, with 6 bolt disc mounts, 28 spokes, made of carbon fibre, in stock, and then arranged by discount level? Then want to buy it for an actual reasonable price, and receive it within a calendar week (pretty great considering I'm on the opposite side of the world), then CRC is literally unmatched. Components etc are sensibly, correctly and consistently arranged by type and feature in a way that makes me wish every other online retailer would take several pages out of their book. I've hunted for bike components on Amazon, it was a painful experience that resulted in a lot of manual searching, going between several pages trying to compare between half a dozen differently formatted and arranged spec sheets just to figure out which components were compatible, and even then the prices were not worth it.
- neosat 7y ago
  was looking for tires -the site looks great. Thanks!
unethical_ban 7y ago
Lowe's shopping site is an abomination, a tome of anti-patterns to be researched in design classes on what not to implement in e-commerce. It is a shame, because I really would like to purchase more from non-Amazon sources.
fisherjeff 7y ago
Personally, I applaud Home Depot and Lowes for so meticulously recreating the utter dysfunction of their brick and mortar stores online
gbrown 7y ago
I’ve had good luck ordering lumber and landscaping supplies from Home Depot. No problems in half a dozen orders.
- Fjolsvith 7y ago
  Another good one if you're in the midwest is Menards. They regularly have an 11% rebate which, for me, adds up quite a bit. Pro tip for if you can physically go to one of their stores: If you make a purchase and they run their 11% rebate the next week, ask at the front desk for the pre-rebate adjustment, which lets you get it for your previous purchase.
Blackthorn 7y ago
Zoro. Which is a division of Grainger, iirc. Their website isn't the best for finding things, but I've never had any issues with an order from them, ever. And I've bought a lot of stuff.

coding123 7y ago

This is a key point. Especially for prime items, but largely to other items they sell that are not fulfilled by them. It just feels like there is more responsibility through the amazon platform than other websites. I ordered a case of water through Amazon through a reseller. The shipment literally got lost. Amazon dispute, 20 minutes later, refund is done. I am waiting for a resolution through Paypal from another website - off amazon - since Friday for toilet paper that will definitely not be sent. After looking at policies, etc.. they generally don't do refunds. Though, I did have luck on one other site.

kbash9 7y ago

Never had an issue with costco.com where I've made some of my big purchases.

Someone1234 7y ago
Just this week I had an issue with Costco.com. Ordered an item, their delivery estimate was 3-5 days. 7 days passed and the item hasn't shipped. No updated ETA or any information/communication on how long it might take. Decided to cancel and order from an alternative vendor (who would communicate better, frankly). Was unable to even cancel it online (cancel button was missing, in contradiction to their help docs). Tried to use Online Chat to cancel, which was seemingly offline/broken for multiple days. Finally called their customer service number, and it was cancelled within the hour (which credit where credit is due was one of the best telephone customer service experiences I've had). Took all of 10 days to NOT receive a 3-5 day item from Costco.com, the replacement item ordered elsewhere arrived in 48 hours. Still don't know how long the Costco.com item would have taken because they never communicated that.
- ethbro 7y ago
  From experience internally (not at Costco, but other t20 retail), here's what happened, from most to least likely. 1. Your order type fell into an edge cast that an incomplete batch system -> system transfer job choked on. Naturally, it silently failed. 2. Inventory count mismatch. 3. Incomplete transportation handshake. Logistics looks simple from a customer perspective: (1) order, (2) ship, (3) receive. From a vendor perspective it's (1+) bulk source, (2+) distribute, (3) maintain consistent inventory counts, (4) receive order, (5) source order items from stock most efficiently, (6) orchestrate multi-sourced items, (7+) provision & batch transportation, receiving and reshipping at multiple legs, (8+) fulfill last mile. All while stitching together 30+ year old systems for each of those. And the +'d items are all semi-outside of the company's control. (Ever wonder why there are so many transportation-abstraction companies?) Which is to say, no excuse for bad service. But it's a bear of a problem. Incidentally, why most retail has excellent customer support phone centers (usually onshore): they know their systems break a non-zero amount of time, and want the best touch when you need to have things fixed.

cpascal 7y ago

> Other than BestBuy, no other retailer "gets" ecommerce Target.com is a pretty solid experience. Walmart.com is also surprisingly good. Although I'm sure people can provide horror stories for both retailers.

dawnerd 7y ago
Walmart still suffers the same problem Amazon has with 3rd party sellers. Quality can vary greatly depending on who you're buying from on their platform. Target and Best Buy definitely nailed it.
- gowld 7y ago
  If you have an ad blocker. Target sells ad space to random 3rd parties.
- wozniacki 7y ago
  Walmart has been spot on with both their delivery as well pickup-in-store items. I wish they installed FREEZER SILOS at all of their locations for their pickup-in-store FROZEN foods that can be ordered online. Right now only select places have them. You cant order frozen foods online at the rest of the locations. But otherwise they have been great with all of my orders. HomeDepot and Lowes are a joke. HomeDepot.com even tried to sneak in a 'handling fee' at the checkout ( paraphrasing I forget what they called it ) for a small kitchen appliance though it said 'free shipping' at first glance next to the item description.
whymauri 7y ago
I'll toss Staples on to there. I ordered a chair two years ago. Relatively modern website, free delivery, and it arrived earlier than anticipated with no damage. Just make sure you unsubscribe from their newsletter. I also think they'll price-match.
- mortenjorck 7y ago
  I was surprised when I ordered from Staples.com a week or two ago. They have a top-tier e-commerce experience, fast shipping (I think my free one-day shipping was a temporary quarantine thing), and they seem to be better at packing than Amazon.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

croshan 7y ago

Sure, but they handle it well. I placed an order for a pair of 35lb dumbbells, and only one came, and the cardboard box around it was falling apart. I called customer support, probably for the first time in my life, to ask wtf happened. And they explained the logistics issue (the dumbbells were shipped separately for some reason), and ended up crediting me half the cost of the dumbbells, even though the first wasn't really damaged. Also their dumbbells were better and cheaper than Amazon's, so there's that too.

lkbm 7y ago
> (the dumbbells were shipped separately for some reason) USPS limits packages to 70 LBs. There's probably some special option to get around this, but for the "normal" shipping, that's the limit.
- TylerE 7y ago
  If there is, it will cost 5x as much. They really don’t like special handling.

ravenstine 7y ago

To be fair, the in-person shopping experience at Home Depot is exactly the same. They're staying true to their ethos. ;)

Shivetya 7y ago

Best Buy is great, especially for delivery. Apple, CostCo, Ashley Home Funiture, Wayfair, Wal-Mart, and some minor players, have all performed well in my usage and those who I know also use them. Now with two I had a damaged item they did not want any part of returned, apparently this is common with free shipping deals as the return shipping for larger items can be ridiculous. Home Depot I have to agree with assessments others have made, lost an item off their own dock and when recreating the order after two weeks of back and forth; UPS was getting annoyed too, they wanted to remake the order and charge full shipping again. Just really bad customer service. They really do act like all screw ups are yours.

sseagull 7y ago

I imagine this is one of those things where everyone has different experiences. Or maybe it depends on location. We recently moved into a new house (from an apartment) and needed lots of little things renters never worry about. I have ordered quite a bit of stuff from Home Depot, from a washer & dryer to a lawn mower to random small tools and paint. Never had any issue whatsoever.

AmVess 7y ago

Nordstrom does it well. I buy shirts and things and they arrive reasonably packaged, and include a return print out ready to go. Returning an item is as simple as putting the print out on the outside of a box and leaving it for the mail collector.

Someone1234 7y ago

I had a Home Depot order delivered recently, zero padding. It was just a cardboard box surrounding the product, and the product itself had little internal packaging (inc. Lithium Ion batteries). I'm surprised Home Depot hasn't started fires before. Luckily the product I ordered worked fine, but I wasn't best pleased when I opened it. It was pretty obvious the manufacturer designed the product packaging for retail shelves only, and Home Depot just assumed it was shipping-grade protection.

passthejoe 7y ago
My favorite from Target was eight Contigo travel mugs (bought for holiday gifts) that came in a very large box with no padding. Even though they could have clanked around and gotten very scratched, they were all OK. Sort of a miracle, but it didn't give me much confidence in Target.com. And you can't state quantities on the Target.com site when you select an item. You have to go into the cart and change the quantity. That's something most sites do better. Also, I understand it's a difficult time inventory-wise, but don't let me put stuff in my cart if you can't deliver it and won't let me order anything until I remove them. Give me a "save for later" feature ... like Amazon does.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  One thing that’s weird about target is that they fulfill from stores. Usually when we get a shady packaging experience it’s shipping from a Target store from some unusual place.

mauvehaus 7y ago

I beg to differ. Rock Auto is where it's at for auto parts. The website is ugly as hammered shit, but it's fast, shows you the options grouped by rough quality level (economy/you cheapskate, daily driver, performance, etc), shows you what part to select so it ships from the same warehouse as the parts already in your cart and saves you shipping, and returns are painless (disclaimer: I've only ever done returns for core exchanges). I have never had a better online purchasing experience. And the prices are a fraction of what you pay at a brick and mortar place. Especially for e.g. wiper blades. Companies that "get" e-commerce are out there, but a lot of them are quietly and competently doing their thing in unsexy domains and aren't trying to eat the whole pie. Rock Auto, for instance, isn't trying to serve every idiot on the planet with a car. If you can't keep your lefts/rights and fronts/backs straight when ordering e.g. brake hoses, you're going to find it a frustrating experience. Putting up a (small) barrier to entry to keep out the least clueful people probably helps keep their costs down. Not affiliated, just a very happy repeat customer.

racnid 7y ago
Their website is one of the clearest and easiest to navigate parts website I've ever come across. I just wish there was an equivalent for motorcycles.
- kube-system 7y ago
  Bikebandit's website isn't too bad after you figure out how to select your bike.
solotronics 7y ago
I like NAPA/Oreilly where you can see whats in a store and have them set the parts aside for you so they are there when you get there.
- mauvehaus 7y ago
  Advance and I believe Autozone also let you place orders for in-store pickup. At one point, Advance was putting a coupon code right at the top of the homepage that would save you 20% off your order if you did that.

beamatronic 7y ago

Target is okay although I often get cosmetically damaged packaging.

powvans 7y ago

I thought the same thing about Home Depot until this hit. I've had the opposite experience with them the last few weeks. Things come quickly, my cart is consistent wherever I am logged in, and I can just add pretty much as much stuff as I want and get it all delivered the next day for $9. I'm loving the express delivery. In general it would always be worth it for me to spend $9 to get stuff delivered from Home Depot. Pre-pandemic it's a solid hour or more in the car to cover the 4.3 miles there and back from my house. Maybe I'm getting a better experience because I'm in Atlanta and there's a bit of a headquarters halo effect. Their search and general catalog organization isn't great. I just use Google as my entrance to their site and that makes life easier.

smichel17 7y ago

I've been pretty happy with newegg, and my recent electronics purchases have been split between it, Amazon, and direct from manufacturer (preferring direct unless there is a significant price difference, due to counterfeit-wariness).

Spooky23 7y ago

That’s crazy. Target smokes Amazon for most things these days, especially with pickup. Ditto for NewEgg and Walmart. Amazon is increasingly overrated, they peaked a decade ago and have declined to a warehouse club/flea market.

cschneid 7y ago
Newegg and Walmart have fallen to the same thing Amazon has: allowing 3rd party sellers. They're not as far along, but going down that path is what causes so many issues with counterfeits and generally poor experiences. I accidentally bought some thermal paste from a newegg seller who shipped it via slow-boat-from-china, and it took weeks to get to me. It was technically listed, but I hate any shopping experience that forces me to be on high alert not to get screwed (as minor as super-slow shipping is).
- reilly3000 7y ago
  Target is getting into the 3rd party seller game through Target+. It appears they have a pretty tight process for what gets approved to sell and who gets to sell it. Target by culture is extremely intentional about what they allow on their shelves, and it appears they are following suit with their 'curated' 3rd party sellers.
- senderista 7y ago
  AFAIK Amazon is the only online retailer that commingles their own inventory with 3rd-party sellers, making it impossible to avoid counterfeits.
gregmac 7y ago
I honestly don't understand the 3rd party seller thing. I went from buying almost all PC parts from NewEgg (without even bothering to price shop), to pretty much avoiding the site entirely. If you look at almost any of the 3rd party sellers' pages and sort by rating, you'll pretty much see the same pattern on all: a tiny handful of 4-5 star reviews, 1 star reviews by the bottom of page 1, and the remaining 80 pages of products have no reviews at all. Is this really helping Walmart/NewEgg/Amazon/etc vs them just selling the same products directly themselves? Why do this -- are they just trying to avoid these sellers starting competing no-name e-commerce sites?

arkades 7y ago

Try mcmaster-carr. They beat the stuffing out of home depot, lowe's and amazon all when it comes to hardware.

jakearmitage 7y ago
Holy crap, this is awesome. I could find the EXACT pipe fitting I needed. How did I not know about this?

jasonjayr 7y ago

I assist a small drop ship supplier listing their product in Home Depot. Their item management system is absolutely the pits, and requires the use of awful protected excel worksheets in order to get mass data in and out of the system. All the product syndication systems that they recommend are obnoxiously expensive for the amount of SKUs we need to maintain due to product variants. Overstock & Wayfair are way easier to work with by comparison.

Buttons840 7y ago

Even BestBuy has problems. I have an order waiting to ship I want to cancel/return (unopened) but they won't let me. Guess they'll have to go through the full return process rather than just let me cancel. Meanwhile, Amazon can cancel items even after they ship most of the time.

battery_cowboy 7y ago

Target is pretty great, I replaced Amazon with Target for most things.

munificent 7y ago

> Other than BestBuy, no other retailer "gets" ecommerce. Sweetwater for music gear. They are the only online company I've ever dealt with that I consider better than Amazon.

FridgeSeal 7y ago

Chain Reaction Cycles for bike gear is unmatched, and outdoes Amazon by a mile. Search, sorting and faceting features are unmatched: Looking for a pair of handlebars: you can filter by material, colour, width, diameter, rise, sweep, brand, stock level, price. Need some wheels, specifically a wheel set that has a 25mm internal rim diameter, for road biking, disc brake compatible, with 6 bolt disc mounts, 28 spokes, made of carbon fibre, in stock, and then arranged by discount level? Then want to buy it for an actual reasonable price, and receive it within a calendar week (pretty great considering I'm on the opposite side of the world), then CRC is literally unmatched. Components etc are sensibly, correctly and consistently arranged by type and feature in a way that makes me wish every other online retailer would take several pages out of their book. I've hunted for bike components on Amazon, it was a painful experience that resulted in a lot of manual searching, going between several pages trying to compare between half a dozen differently formatted and arranged spec sheets just to figure out which components were compatible, and even then the prices were not worth it.

neosat 7y ago
was looking for tires -the site looks great. Thanks!

unethical_ban 7y ago

Lowe's shopping site is an abomination, a tome of anti-patterns to be researched in design classes on what not to implement in e-commerce. It is a shame, because I really would like to purchase more from non-Amazon sources.

fisherjeff 7y ago

Personally, I applaud Home Depot and Lowes for so meticulously recreating the utter dysfunction of their brick and mortar stores online

gbrown 7y ago

I’ve had good luck ordering lumber and landscaping supplies from Home Depot. No problems in half a dozen orders.

Fjolsvith 7y ago
Another good one if you're in the midwest is Menards. They regularly have an 11% rebate which, for me, adds up quite a bit. Pro tip for if you can physically go to one of their stores: If you make a purchase and they run their 11% rebate the next week, ask at the front desk for the pre-rebate adjustment, which lets you get it for your previous purchase.

Blackthorn 7y ago

Zoro. Which is a division of Grainger, iirc. Their website isn't the best for finding things, but I've never had any issues with an order from them, ever. And I've bought a lot of stuff.